Reading List: Non-Fiction

Konrad Zuse is one of the many giants on whose shoulders my industry stands. I still remember being a know-it-all teenager and pointing out to my English teacher, Mrs. W. (yes, the ex-wife of my German teacher, Mr. W.), that the computer wasn’t actually invented in the US, as our textbook claimed, but by a German. This

Some days, you start to lose faith in humanity. On days like that, I’d recommend this book. It tells the story of how a small Canadian town opened its doors to the people stranded there when all flights were grounded.

When you sit in a doctor’s waiting room with a book, you almost feel like a snob already, while everyone around you stares into their phone, completely entangled in the net. If on top of that you’re reading a small Reclam book, it looks even a little “snobbier”. And if the title then happens to be “Über die Dummheit” (

I don’t think many people really understand how LLMs work. Why they manage to come across as if they “know” things, even though they’re “just” a model of language, not of knowledge (though this book also raises the question of whether the two can really be separated at all). Why being wrong is baked into how they work.

Reclam publishes a small but, in my opinion, very fine series of little books. The series is called “Was bedeutet das alles?” (“What does it all mean?”). The books are roughly the size of the Reclam booklets I knew from school. Only they aren’t yellow, but colourful. “What does it all mean?” is indeed a question I ask

There are images of events that have burned themselves indelibly into my memory: the falling towers on September 11, the crumpled ICE train at Eschede. And that image of the “major malfunction” on January 28, 1986: the Space Shuttle “Challenger”, having just exploded. The cloud at the end of the flight, out of which th

As a fourth-grader, staying up late isn’t exactly easy. I had to promise not to be grumpy the next morning, however tired I was. I kept that promise, and so I was actually allowed to stay up, for weeks on end. What for? In 1983, Cosmos was on TV, and I got to watch every episode – together with my parents. It’s one of